Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Today I visited the giveaway page of a group promotion and have a lesson to share about do's and don'ts in reusing previously created material for purposes such as this. Simply put: Make sure reports and recordings present you in the best possible light to first-time readers or listeners. Don't go rummaging among the content you have hanging around without first considering whether or not the material makes sense apart from the occasion for which you created it.

The first recording I listened to from this giveaway page was a previewteleseminar for a weekend workshop that took place last February. The recordingdid have some useful content. However, at least 35% of the audio consisted ofpromotion for an event that took place last year. This created a poorimpression by wasting my time. It made the person who had selected this item tobe given away now seem thoughtless and absentminded.

The second recording made an even worse, self-sabotaging mistake. It was ateleseminar interview of an expert in which the interviewer did not introducehimself. He merely introduced the expert. In the original context, this mayhave made sense, if those who signed up for the call knew who he was. (Note,though, that on professional radio and TV, even the most famous interviewersalways introduce themselves or are introduced.) On the giveaway page, theinterviewer is named and appears to be the one who contributed the interview.But when listeners hear the interview, they are normally far away from thegiveaway page, making this contributed item useless for the interviewerâ€™sself-promotion.

I am pretty sure that both of these giveaway participants did not take the timeto listen to what they had decided to give away. The presentations wereprobably originally well received, so they figured they could reuse them for thecurrent purpose.

Four Repurposing Criteria

Don't make their asinine assumption! Before reusing something you previouslycreated, take another look or listen with the following questions in mind.

1. Audience. Compare the original audience for your item with the proposedrepurposed audience. Did you present your ideas in a way that made sense forthe first and will equally make sense for the second? You may think thatdentists have the same cash flow problems as acupuncturists, but if theacupuncturists keep hearing or reading â€œdentist, dentist, dentist,â€ theymight not be receptive. If the new audience wonâ€™t know you, are you properlyintroduced in this piece?

2. Promotional offer. Normally itâ€™s rude to reuse material designed topromote an event that is no longer valid and expect that readers or listenerswon't mind. I always edit promos out of teleseminar recordings beforerepurposing them, out of consideration for the audience, unless the promotionaloffer remains in force. You should do so, too.

3. Content. Besides an offer, is there anything else thatâ€™s now seriously outof date in your product? To take an extreme case, something discussing onlinemarketing that refers to CompuServe and Prodigy (services that were popular inthe early 1990s) would be dismissed as dinosaur food now. Likewise, repurposedmaterial should make little or no reference to current events.

4. Quality. Is the technical level of your product either adequate orexcellent? Sometimes things work well for one purpose but backfire in anothersetting. A video that explains something well within a longer how-to productmight not be looked on as kindly out of context, or vice versa. People whoalready know and trust you may hardly notice sound interference or garish imagesthat distract and turn off strangers.

"Create it once, reuse it a thousand times." This saying contains importantwisdom for information marketers as long as you also stop and think beforerepurposing!

The author of 11 books and five multimedia home-study courses, Marcia Yudkin hasbeen selling information in one form or another since 1981. Download a freerecording of her answers to the most commonly asked questions about informationmarketing by entering your information into the privacy-assured request box athttp://www.yudkin.com/informationempire.htm .